Does vinyl really sound much better then mp3 or cds?

S

Spencer

Member
Joined
Jun 6, 2008
Messages
171
Reaction score
0
Points
16
I have a ton of vinyl(although no Bloomfield vinyl Marty) and i was thinking on getting a record player because i have been listening to most music from my Iphone

Is it alot better
@Marty wow the only Bloomfield vinyl i saw was the one he did with John Hammond and Dr.John. Its Not Killing Me is one of my favorite albums
 
LMAO!
I promise you Spence, I haven't forgotten about the Bloomfield, just haven't had time to deal with that yet.

Yes, vinyl sounds much better than CDs (although not to many who grew up with the sanitized sound of digital media), and much, much, much better than MP3s, which are even more compressed.

Edit: Just took this to tide you over Spence. There's more solo stuff, not to mention the misc. bands, but they're in some unsorted stacks I believe. http://www.flickr.com/photos/90143219@N02/8462264490/in/photostream
 
depends on personal taste. The sound QUALITY of vinyl is not near as good, (cracks, pops, thin "tinny" sound etc.) but aesthetically, i would have to say i actually prefer vinyl. maybe it is nostalgia since i remember when that from before cds or mp3s, or just a wabi-sabi thing (beauty in imperfection, or flawed beauty).
 
No. Not even close. The 'warm' sound is a placebo.... the same reason why people like crappy Polaroid and Instamatic pictures (thus explaining the Instagram craze).

Vinyl has dust, pops, scratches, wow, no pitch stability, and loses fidelity every time you play it. Sure, it is 'analog' with theoretically infinite bit rate, but it is far beyond the range of human hearing to appreciate.


The 16 bit, 14,000 Kbps of a CD is capable of producing any sound the human ear is capable of hearing in the quietest room known to man. Plus it has error correction.... so unless there is a very large scratch on the disc it will sound exactly like it was when it was taken off the analog master tape.

The CD is so convincing, that CD recordings of vinyl records have fooled audiophiles into thinking they were listening to LPs.

MP3s are a lossy codec and isn't very good. Much better is AAC.... which has less fidelity than vinyl but has the advantage of being dust and scratch free and will play at concert pitch infallibly.
 
I think so. I think it has an earth-tone, a surface sound that digital music doesn't have. On the other hand digital is perfectly clear. It's a matter of opinion if you prefer the crystal clarity or not.
But if you have a ton of vinyl I think you should invest in a record player and actually listen to it.
 
Hearing degrades with age: the upper frequencies go, even if you take care to avoid excessively loud noise. I think I've always had good hearing; I could hear bats (25 kHz+) until my early 30s. I've just run one of those online hearing tests, and can hear 14 kHz.

I can still tell the difference between vinyl and CD, let alone MP3. Vinyl is "warmer" or "richer" than the other two. It obviously depends on the sound system; I bought a completely new one last year, it was the third most expensive thing I've ever bought, after a house and a car. Buy yourself the best you can afford, and take advice from the people around here about how to keep vinyl in good condition!

Very early vinyl wasn't necessarily that good, though. Sir Tom Jones was on the radio recently, and confirmed a memory of mine that in the 1950s some people preferred the sound of shellac 78s to vinyl 45s.

Happy listening!
 
That's subjective. Although sound quality is better with mp3, people enjoy the nostalgicc sound quality of listening to vinyl records. This is especially the case with older records that have that signature popping noise. However, it's totally a preference thing:)
 
One reason people say this is because there is a fuzzy-clicky back-ground-noise to vinyl. Music tends to sound more well-toned when you listen to it against a subtle white noise.

Think of it like a painting: if you were to look at the paint just floating against the sky, separate from the canvas, that would be weird. But when it's against the canvas, it's soothing to the eyes. MP3s and CDAs feel synthetic sometimes because they aren't dithered.

If you were to take those songs to the beach and listen to them, they would sound more natural because the sound of the ocean would fill in the empty gaps of the sound spectrum.
 
Back
Top